Modern health care practice relies on patients to consistently take their medications, nutraceuticals and supplements at one or more specific intervals during the day and to accurately record or remember each time a dose was taken. Typically, the patient's doctor will create a medication schedule for the patient and instruct the patient to follow the schedule. However, with changes in medications and their dosing schedules or when the patient has multiple medications that may be taken at different times, the schedule can quickly become complex and unwieldy.
In an effort to simplify medication schedules and keep better track of when a particular medication was last taken, various products and methods have been developed. One approach was to build a timer into a bottle cap, to indicate the last time the bottle was opened, helping the patient to easily see when their last dosage was taken by looking at the timer. This solution only allows for a single or short term display of when the bottle was last opened or closed.
It is currently estimated that in developed countries such as the U.S. less than 50% of the medications prescribed are taken as directed. Poor medication adherence, or failure to comply with medication dosage instructions, results in more than 125,000 deaths, 1.5 million injuries and $300 Billion in increased health care costs annually in the U.S. alone. The reasons for these injuries and deaths range from underdoses and overdoses, interactions between drugs, errors dispensing or administering drugs, failure to take drugs as directed due to forgetfulness, or due to poor monitoring of patients on medication.
Additionally, some people cannot be trusted with unmonitored access to various drugs because they may lack the self-control or adequate presence of mind to know when and how to properly take their medication.
It is impractical to have a qualified physician or health professional be present at each drug administration due to the billions of prescriptions prescribed each year. Also, manually keeping track of one's drug regimens for review by a qualified physician is not practical for most busy people, and the record is effectively worthless unless each and every administration is tracked and recorded. Manually tracking drug administration is simply not a reliable solution.
When dealing with today's highly effective prescription drugs, even minor discrepancies between when a drug was administered and what the recorded administration time shows, may have significant impact. Leaving the patient be in charge of that record keeping is almost certain to result in discrepancies.
Various products and methods have been developed in order to simplify medication schedules and keep better track of when a particular medication was last taken. U.S. Pat. No. 6,424,599 issued to Ditzig, discloses a disposable bottle cap reminder device with an electronic counter that counts time when activated and resets time when deactivated. The electronic counter is connected to a battery and switching mechanism is comprised of a conductive contact spring in conductive contact with the power source and a conductive plate. While this disclosure teaches how to detect whether a bottle cap has been opened, as many other references have, it does so only by counting the time since the last time the container was opened, which fails to place that information into a format which can be compiled and transmitted quickly and easily.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,604,650, issued to Sagar, discloses a medicine dispensing system that has a timer and informs the user as to whether or when to take a next medication dose. A communications interface enables programming of a parameter associated with administering a medication. Importantly, the functionality of this device is limited to detecting whether a dose of medication has been taken, and reminding a user to take medication through receipt of a signal from a sensor.
U.S. Published Patent Application No. (USPPN) 2012/0163132, filed by Downey, discloses a system and method for wirelessly programming a prescription bottle cap. The system includes a base station comprising an inductor and processor configured to receive instructions, which may then be transferred to the prescription bottle cap via the use of an inductor to alter the magnetic field of the prescription bottle cap to reflect the newer dosage. Importantly, this reference merely discloses how to send and program reminders into a prescription bottle cap, and fails to offer the user a method of monitoring and transmitting data regarding actual drug administration.
USPPN 2012/0187142, filed by Flowers, discloses a bottle cap which is capable of transmitting data related to precise time data regarding when a cap was opened and closed with respect to a container with multiple chambers. Flowers focuses entirely on a multi-chamber container and when each chamber was opened, and utterly fails to disclose recording interval data from a container with a single chamber.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,707,763, issued to Osberg, and concurrently owned with the present invention, discloses a pharmaceutical bottle timer cap that informs the user how long it has been since the medication in the bottle was taken. The Osberg timer cap automatically starts the timer when the cap is replaced on the bottle after the medication has been taken. The Osberg timer cap has no way to automatically record and send measurements and data to be used or viewed elsewhere at a later time.
Simply put, before the present invention, transmitting wireless information regarding container cap opening and closing interval data has never been disclosed, taught, or suggested by any reference. Thus, what is needed is a container cap with a chip, transmitter, and receiver that automatically collects and sends interval data or information to be further processed and interpreted at a later time using an external computer or other type of electronic data processing unit.